


if i could change it all

by pharaohleap



Category: Operation: Mindcrime (Album)
Genre: F/M, Five Stages of Grief, Hallucinations, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Institutions, Past Drug Use, Religious Content, Time Skips, from the end of mindcrime i all the way through to the end of mindcrime ii, this boy's never gonna catch a break
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-29 23:05:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12641142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pharaohleap/pseuds/pharaohleap
Summary: It starts with a corpse in a habit and a man, driven insane, screaming through the night because of it.





	1. denial

**Author's Note:**

> Written originally as a submission for my high school's literary and arts magazine, which was dang near two years ago by now. Shoot. Tragically, it didn't get in, but in hindsight, I'm not SUPER surprised. It's... pretty dark. What else do you expect from a Mindcrime story, though?
> 
> This was written as a "five stages of grief"-inspired work, meaning that there's a chapter and specific scene for each/associated with each of the stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We start during Mindcrime's "I Don't Believe In Love" and end with Mindcrime II's (trashy) "All the Promises". I hate Mindcrime II just as much as the next guy, don't get me wrong, but I... WOULD be lying if it didn't help with characterization when writing these works and forum roleplay posts as Nikki. ... I'm in deep, guys. I'm in deep. Anywho, please enjoy this trashy mess and the inevitable slew of grammatical and spelling errors. o/

It starts with his head slammed into a desk, eyes exploding into one thousand supernovas and the screaming of a choir numbering two million kick starting in the back of his head all in unison. Blind – from the impact, from the shock, from the start of jolting awake and his brain suffering from more than one sort of whiplash. Handcuffed – wrists pulling apart from one another only to find themselves locked firmly behind his back, behind the rickety chair that cries out in agony with each subtle shift of his trembling legs. A  _hostage_  – kidnapped by the law, broken by hypocrisy, held by his own guilty subconscious. For what, he can't remember, mind still reeling from the force of the blow and what he vaguely recalls as some greater tragedy further still into the past, but it's certainly  _there_ , and it's taking its sweet time tying his stomach into more knots than he could ever hope to count. Dizziness spills over him like water from the faucet, like hot breath from parted lips, and it isn't his fault that he can't find it in himself to comprehend the words dancing in the periphery of his mind; he hears the anger, but not the meaning, and he's only just realized that whoever had been spewing what was registering as little more than nonsense into the air has paused when, once again, fingers find themselves in his scalp, pulling up and into the air and forcing down, down, down toward the earth. Down, down, down toward the table. Reality breaks into focus with the attack, splatter paintings of colors behind his eyelids finally registering as the dirty interrogation room he's being held in.

Nikki's heart pauses, the rest of his body joining in to lurch to a sudden halt at the sight, but scraping his thoughts for some idea of what has landed himself in this situation ( _watched by the condescending eyes of the woman across the room, still at the mercy of the temperamental man grunting with impatience behind him_ ) earns him nothing more than a blank mind. He'd press the concern further – it  _must_  be important if the police have taken him into custody, right? - but not a moment is wasted before they're talking again, asking if he'll ( _demanding that he_ ) start cooperating, and he can't leave them waiting any more than he already has if he wants to spare his skull from cracking due to repeated table-related injury. As such, he nods numbly, aching head pulling itself sluggishly through the motions as it tries to focus more on what they are questioning him about than his retreating and returning vision and the camera eye watching his every move from above. They speak, words suddenly crisp against his eardrums, and the images and sounds come rushing back to him in a torrent.  _Oh_. So it doesn't start with his head slammed into a desk -

It starts with a corpse in a habit and a man driven insane screaming through the night because of it. Mary's corpse; his own legs carrying him through Seattle's rainy streets, waking the dead hours of the early morning.

And they believe that  _he_  was the one who killed her.

Perhaps he did. The gun may have been in his hands, and it could have been his index finger that pulled the trigger to end her existence in this world. But they don't  _understand_ , because even if it was his body, it definitely wasn't his mind, so it couldn't have been his fault. "I didn't do it," he repeats in a mantra each time they ask if he was responsible for the murder of the nun, each time they ask who it was if he was not to blame. Fingers dig into the solid surface of the table before him, body quivering at a morbid slideshow of images that replay in his mind over and over again and his lip's inability to form any sentence other than the repeated insistence that he has done nothing wrong, but his relatively functioning mind is still working enough to be amazed at how long they continue to press him before realizing it to be a futile effort. ( _Working enough to flood with horror when he realizes that – unable to get so much as a_ name  _out of their supposed murderer – they plan to admit him to the state hospital._ )

She haunts his mind, and in the early days, it's her alone. The golden tresses of her hair get tangled in his own pale mop of curls; the hymns she had loved, sang with strength pulled from false dedication, ring in his ears; the sight of her face, smiling at him when all others would have spat, burns itself behind his eyelids and throws him back into awareness with each closing of the eyes. Mary is long gone, now, off to an afterlife she had so firmly believed in ( _the sort that could never accept failures like himself_ ), but he swears he can see her in the crowd as they half lead, half drag him out to his new "home" ( _new prison_ ), and the nurse they assign him sounds just like she would have had the nun held as much hatred for him as everyone else in the psychiatric ward ( _in the city beyond_ ). Sometimes, it's suffocating, just how much he misses her. Worse still is the cascading guilt that comes with knowing that she could have been alive if only they had not befriended one another all of those eternities ago. She should have known better than to get involved with a hitman – and he should have known better than to let her get to him.

On the nights that he's hysterical, eyes wild, arms tossing like salad in a mixing bowl, practically foaming at the mouth, he tries to solace himself as what seems like half of the entire ward seems to come in to sedate him. If she didn't ever mean anything to him in the first place, her death can't break him the way it does – the way it has. If he never loved her from the start – loved her voice, the honey sweet words, the way she forgave him where the rest of the world would have wanted him dead – then he wouldn't have found himself here at all. If only he didn't believe in love – he  _doesn't believe in love_  -

Nikki remembers her rosary in illness-inducing detail, and he wishes that he could say he didn't.


	2. anger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hinges creak for one final time, the door shuts with a great slam – and it all comes rushing back to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to think that Nikki went sort of through a painful loop of "oh crud, who am I and why am I here????" and "OOOOOOH GOSH, I REMEMBER NOW, I TAKE IT BACK, I TAKE IT BACK, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW", then back again during his stay in the mental institution. For a while, anyway. Clearly, this had to stop at some point for him to get released later. *shrugs into the abyss*

Cycles. His life is a series of  _cycles_ ; one horror traded for another at each twist and turn of his existence, and the name Nikki Strauss would mean nothing without its morbid routines trailing on the last syllables of the title. Work for Doctor X, too, had been nothing but a continuous circle of hits, meetings, meals, and more hits still, and even the small reprieve he'd had upon leaving only earned him a new schedule to follow all the same ( _alongside a dead lover_ ): sleep, remember, sedatives, forget, and repeat. He loses himself in the morning and reclaims his history in dreams, but as dull sunlight filtering through Seattle's rainy clouds splatter against his ghostly pale skin in the day that follows, he finds himself once again without any recollection of who he is and how he has managed to land himself in a room set aside for only the most criminally insane. Nurses hiss profanities at him from under their breath, his doctor seemingly given up on him ( _if there'd ever been any faith in him to begin with_ ), and as the whole world tries to swat at him like a bothersome insect, he can only grasp for the straws that might tell him what he's done to make humanity hate him so.

Make  _himself_  hate him so.

It's difficult to gauge time, chained as much to his bed by his mental distaste for movement as the straps meant to hold him down; every twilight is one eternity dying to give rise to the next, and the former hitman can't be sure if it's weeks or years before his ears catch the sound of his door swinging open, screeching hinges signaling the arrival of his foul-tongued attendant. Blue eyes catch her murky green, and there's nothing unusual about the sourness that splays over her countenance; nothing to set this night apart from the hundreds preceding it save for the newscast seeping into his room through the open door from what must be another room. "It's ten minutes past curfew," she says, but the words are lost on him, his mind preoccupied with straining to hear about the exploits of a world he has decided he'll never be a part of again. "Why are you still up?"

"... bizarre murders of political and religious leaders that have shocked this city over the last few months seem to have ended as suddenly as they began. No terrorist group has come forth claiming responsibility for the slaying," the reporter drones in the distance, monotonous words nearly impossible to make out, but the sound of the nurse's own words overlapping them makes it a greater feat still.

"Hello?  _Hello_? … Oh, perhaps you need another shot."

She moves with practiced steps, heels of her shoes clacking against the hard linoleum of his room, but the sound of her footsteps and the sight of the freshly produced syringe are lost under a sudden need to listen to the cast through its entirety. "...spect in custody at the state hospital. His identity is being withheld, ending further investigation. Sports and weather next." A grunt tears itself from his throat as the needle jabs its way through the surface of his skin, but the act of her applying pressure to the plunger, paired with the words still ringing in his ears from the television outside breathe familiarity into the rusted gears of his mind. The noise itself is lost on her, and she smiles a bit to herself as one would at a job well done as she steps away, discarding the used object as well in one fluid motion. Already, a fog is beginning to settle over the vague hints of remembrance ( _and he fights it, fights it hard, because this may be his only chance at answering why he's here to begin with_ ), and it takes the blond more time that he's proud of to process the falsely bright-sounding things she says upon departure.

"That should do it! Sweet dreams..."

Dreams. Yes, dreams; never sweet, though, never sweet. Eyelids pull toward one another, the effort to keep them open greater than the effort to keep himself awake, but he hasn't quite given up on the battle, and the fight for consciousness leaves him able to catch her words on her way through the door. "... you  _monster_." Hinges creak for one final time, the door shuts with a great slam –

\- and it all comes rushing back to him.

He remembers the speech at the park, fiery words spilling from Doctor X's lips in Occidental as the crowd roared back. He remembers the revolution, hunting down the man who had inspired him and dedicating his life to the cause of creating a newer, fairer American, freed from the tyranny of political hypocrisy and religious inequality. He remembers the methodical killings, the gun in his hand, the priest the Doctor had enlisted and the nun he had brought with him. The candle lighting, the fresh guilt over crimes long ago committed, the  _blackmail_ , the  _brainwashing_  - and the sweet Sister Mary's lifeless eyes staring back at him. His own shattered life looking back at him in the mirror through the eyes of a stranger.

Anger shatters Nikki's mind, liquid fury seeping through the spider web of cracks, and he sucks in a pained gulp of air at the overload of information. Consciousness swings back and forth with him, mind running with the speed of a car to process everything he had forgotten while the drug fought hard to keep him down, and it's in this pendulum of awareness that one thought stands out above all of the other painful thoughts dancing around his mind: All of this -  _every single detail_  - is all the Doctor's fault.


	3. bargaining

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Hurray for you, convict," the broad-shouldered guard says, malice Nikki has long since grown accustomed to hearing in most anyone's voice dripping from each consonant. "You're a free man."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus, the official break from Mindcrime I and into Mindcrime II. I realize that I've been calling him a blond (and blue-eyed?)... probably this whole story, which is ENTIRELY based on headcanon, RIP. Was he, like... brunet in the I Remember Now animation and black-haired in Video: Mindcrime? Bah, this is predates me. The curse of being born too late. Either way, if you're reading anything Mindcrime-related from ME, you'd better believe it's been sullied by literal years of headcanon hoarding. Sorry to say. c':

Sixty-five hundred days. Five hundred sixty-one million seconds. Eighteen years of his life stolen, eaten away by a mental institution he had believed would be his permanent residence until the day he died. Improvement started with vocalness, a stubborn refusal to speak to anyone having hindered his ability to "better his mental state" until he finally chose to open his mouth and communicate. It was blatantly clear, even to a fool like himself, that they didn't believe most any of what he said - in their eyes, the Doctor's revolution was a figment of his imagination, and Mary had never loved him at all - but their greatest fault was thinking that, over time, he'd learned to suppress the rage that had led him there in the first place. All he had learned in that terrible place was how to fake a grin and "admit" that all of the operation was in his head and that he never wanted to find himself within those walls again.

The acrid stench of city air serves as a better sucker punch to the nostrils than any, the sight of direct sunlight for the first time in nearly a score of years burning at his retinas, but the sound of his escort out of the hospital and into the "real world" is a fine enough anchor to keep his mind on earth with the rest of his body. "Hurray for you, convict," the broad-shouldered guard says, malice Nikki has long since grown accustomed to hearing in most anyone's voice dripping from each consonant. "You're a free man." Slamming doors cause him to start, shoulders jumping beneath the familiar and welcomed weight of his tattered trench coat, and without so much as an ounce of effort into helping him integrate with the world that has seen so much while he was strapped down to a monochrome bed, he is, again, alone.

A free man.

If only.

A tentative step - another. Soon, he's sulking down the streets he had once owned, littered with scum he'd once claimed to be a part of and smothered by the drizzle tickling the air. No home, no job; there's money, but he hasn't the slightest idea of what to spend it on. There isn't a name or a face in this city that he knows - not a soul in this city that he  _cares_  to know - and only one thought sticks out from the others in his frantic mind; one singular thing that he knows with a certainty. Doctor X is out there somewhere, reveling in the persona he has built from the broken blond's pain, and the only one going to serve the justice that is due is him. The law favors the rich, right? The revolution, however, ( _it's only remaining member_ ) does not.

The former hitman tightens the crisp tie around his neck until the pressure against his skin could choke him, dirty jeans and old t-shirts cast aside in favor of a new attire - a new attitude. He'll mingle with elite, he'll imitate, and no one will ever suspect him to be the one-man death machine they had all feared until he's squeezed them of all the information he needs. The cruel gather around the cruel, the wealthy around obsessively ornate figures, and if there's one chance at finding the demagogue ( _just like the old days, he muses, only the crowd this time is quite the one hundred eighty turn_ ), it's finding him here. He's supposed to be cured, fit for life with the rest of society - but the weight of the gun he's smuggled is a trembling comfort against the inside of his shirt, and the only things he can see and hear are all of the things the Doctor and the nun had shown and said to him all of those many years ago.

He'll never be  _cured_  so long as Mary's murderer goes unpunished.

A life for a life.  _No_ : One life for many. A hundred corpses, some guilty, some innocent flash through his mind, and Nikki knows that the only thing that will make him feel better is watching Doctor X die at his hands.


	4. depression

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mistake after mistake after mistake, and now, there is no one left alive to accuse for them. No one left alive but himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the dialogue sounds disjointed here, that's - well, perhaps not INTENTIONAL, but all of it is taken directly from the Nikki and Hallucination!Mary banter from "An Intentional Confrontation" (Ha, get it? It wasn't intentional, but it was from Intentio- Okay, I'll leave.) as well as a little bit from "A Junkie's Blues" sprinkled in at the end. Actually, pretty much every line of dialogue in this whole piece is taken word-for-word from the album; not because I don't have any idea of how to write these characters, just because I guess I thought it would sound cool at the time?????
> 
> Also, I'd originally wanted to include some DX versus Nikki going on in this chapter, whether it be a physical fight or a battle of the minds (guess who'd win that, HA), since there IS a little bit of that in O:M II, but the length of this segment ended up being twice that of the last, the longest chunk in the whole story, and I figured that the longer I rambled in this piece, the less likely my chance of getting it into the magazine. Guess it was for naught, anyway - and y'all missed out on some quality DX screen time, sorry to say. I'm just as disheartened as you. *paps*

Understanding mocks him from three steps ahead, turning on its heel and blowing raspberries until its face has gone vermillion while he strives and struggles to close the distance. Every moment of his life has been spent reaching for some sort of answer or another – why had he been dealt poor cards as a child; why could he never amount to the other children in school; why was the world eating itself while the culprits, every man, woman, and child, blinked in ignorance and blew it away like the seeds of a dandelion; why was he the only one who was strong enough to take the gun in his own hand and use it to right the wrongs that society was too blind to see itself? He'd thought he'd found it in the Doctor's powerful words, in Mary's ever knowing smile, but they took her from him in the winter and spit him out alone in the spring one thousand days later, and everything he'd thought he had learned from them regurgitates itself as another sugarcoated lie. There's revenge to be had in the seeking out and finding of his former employer, a hunt that has taken months and an unfortunate run-in with the law that almost had him back in the hands of that dreadful, dreadful hospital, but there are  _truths_  to be had in it as well. Truths that only the demagogue could possibly know. Puppet masters don't pull strings without drawing the greater picture in their mind, nor does a puppet dare to ask what those may be, but a dead woman was as good of a scissor to those ties as any, and if he's to live out the rest of his life in relative peace, he  _must_  know why the apocalypse struck him and no one else. Why was  _he_  chosen as the operation's central hitman? What was there to gain, if not only wealth, from the planned killings? Who was to blame for the nun's death: the boy with the gun in his hand? the chess player, buried by the foreground and frowning at his pawn's shift in loyalty? the victim herself, driven to desperation by grief and taking her life, for the first and last time, into her own hands?

Nikki buries them all, unanswered, along with what remains of a man he had once strove to be so much like.

The dawn carries with it more rain, the avenger ( _the murderer_ ) trying and failing to recall the last time his city had blessed its citizens with a clear sky. For years, now, he had dreamed of this moment: dirt toppling over the frozen features of the older man's face, twisted into an expression he'd never worn during their work as directionless revolutionists. Joy, displeasure, listlessness, condescension. They'd all come and gone hundreds of times before. Fear, however, is the suit he'd never donned before; it is the one he wears last, and the one he wears best. Graves are meant for remembering, but the hole that has just been filled is meant to forget, and the living member of their distorted duo plunges the head of the shovel into the dirt one last time, vaguely musing that the clouds and the tears they cry may wash away the evidence as much as it will the memory from his mind. For years, now, he had dreamed of this moment and the clarity, the  _elation_  it would bring. His feet carry him back to the city, tired knees shuffling him thoughtlessly toward where he was supposed to start his life anew, and he, losing himself in the crowd of the early morning commutes, wonders: where is his clarity? where is his elation? He was supposed to have answers, but they never found his ears, and he was supposed to have closure, but his mind is demanding something that he has no answer to:  _And what now_?

Time kisses his forehead as it passes with the speed of a jet, one day slipping so seamlessly into the next that he can't remember if today is a Thursday or a Sunday, if it's August or November. His feet stumble through the motions like those of a drunkard, mind buried in a haze he couldn't possibly describe with words, and through the general tumult of existence and the sleep he has not been getting in what seems like a decade, he can't even bring himself to be surprised when he catches sight of inky fabric in the crowd of faceless denizens, the apparition of a face he once loved shimmering in the newborn hours of the day. Blue eyes lock onto green ( _air; there are no eyes to be seen_ ), and he watches her through a near sightless gaze until she's swallowed whole by the zigzagging of strangers around them. There, then not, and then there again. It isn't the first time he has seen her ghostly image, her hollow eyes staring at him from above when restrained to the ward bed some long time ago, but he remembers what she had told him with each visit and finds dread settling in his heart. Sure enough, when he flees from her forming shape, she follows, tone mimicking that of warmth but lacking the convictions behind it. He sucks in panicked air, footsteps faster as they carry him away from people who don't even care to recognize that he exists, and her mocking words break the silence around them.

"Where are you now?" In life - where is he in life?

"Feeling small -" the blond says, but is interrupted.

"Can't live without it?" His mind jolts at the words, repeated from his days as an insane man when his guilty conscious had created the image of his greatest mistake before his very eyes. "It": the Doctor's death. Days, weeks,  _years_  spent pining over the demise of the one he'd believed to be to blame for all of this, and for so long, he'd honestly believed that he could not live so long as  _that man_  did just the same. Now – now he doesn't know. One is dead, so the other should be alive, but he certainly doesn't  _feel_  alive. Her question and the uncertainty it stirs in him tries to kick the foundation out from beneath him, his whole frame beginning to topple over as he catches the nearby wall with his arm and uses it to keep upright. This, she uses as another knife to the heart. "You call this your best?"

What does she want from him? If he agrees with her, verbalizes all of the self-hating storm that's been brewing in his mind since the day he was born, will she leave him be? Clinging to the idea, needing to be free of the ghost, he admits, "I made my life a mess." It doesn't work, though. Footsteps are silent when there are no feet to make contact with the ground, but he feels her draw closer with the prickle on the back of his neck, and when she speaks, it's louder than it was before.

"Everyone but you sees it."

"What a fool...!" he gasps, anger at himself fueled further by the words he'd heard from so many other people spoken from the mouth of the only one he'd ever let get to him.

"What are you going to do? Make more excuses?" she hisses, suddenly beside him, facade of sweetness melted into acrimony in its purest form. Everything he'd ever done was pin the blame on someone else, and she knows it.  _He_  knows it. Doctor X may have told him where to aim, but  _he_  was the one pulling the trigger. Mistake after mistake after mistake, and now, there is no one left alive to accuse for them. No one but himself. No one left alive but himself.

"... Why don't you tie it off?"

His heart stops.

Most all of this, he's heard before: the mockery, the belittling, the cruelty. It's always different, another batch of verbal poison to burn the former hitman's flesh for every visit, but they never varied in intensity, and she's never gone so far as to speak of – of  _this_. He turns his head, the sight of "Mary" in his periphery becoming a full on gaze, and he wets his lips before seeking confirmation. "... Hang myself?" Lips tug upward, countenance erupting into a grin too malicious to be worn by the face of the sweet Sister Mary, and while he may be able to tell himself with a certainty that this is not her, that not one single part of the disappearing image is  _her_ , the seed planted in his mind still manages to sprout long after her silhouette dissolves into the lukewarm summer's air. ( _No one left alive to blame but himself – no one left alive to blame but himself_.)

He buries his questions with what remains of the Doctor, but his mind ( _his heart_ ) floods with more to take their place in the time that follow. What if this – all of this wandering, all of this uncertainty, all of this despair – never changes? He doesn't think he can live the rest of his life in a state between sleep and awareness, caught in a state of predormitum that never advances into true rest. But what if he  _wasn't_  to blame? It wasn't as though he would have had any blood on his hands had he not been fooled by the Doctor, and it wasn't something  _he_  did to himself that shattered his mind some eighteen years ago, but Mary's death that had brought him down below even the scum of the streets. And they're – they're  _gone_  now, which means that he'll never have to kill, he'll never be labeled insane again. … But they've been gone for some time now, something tells him from the back of his thoughts, and things haven't improved. What if it  _never_  gets any better than this?

Nikki's knees buckle beneath him, unable to support the weight of his frame paired with one million tons of grief, and he buries his tear-soaked face in his hands as his back scrapes against the wall behind him. "Oh -" he chokes between sobs, all alone save for the gray blanket over the sky, the towering buildings around him, and the sound of his own pitiful noises echoed back at him in a symphony of worthlessness, "- what if I'm only insane...?"


	5. acceptance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nikki accepts his fate and falls like autumn leaves – unassuming, unnoticed, and unliving.

Nikki accepts his fate and falls like autumn leaves – unassuming, unnoticed, and unliving.

The world he had fought tooth and nail to protect is no place for him now, every effort wasted and every nose upturned; America will never change, they tell him through eyes chipped from icebergs and backs turned away, and he was as much of a fool for thinking that ending the Doctor's life would reignite his own as he was a fool for thinking a gun in his hand and a dream in his mind would be able to combat the force of millions.  _Stubborn_  millions. They don't want him here, in their city, in their country, and when he looks at himself in the mirror ( _a stranger: blue eyes emptier, skeletal cheeks somehow more hollow_ ), he muses that he doesn't quite want himself here, either. To put the barrel of his Beretta against his temple is more of a service for the world than anything else he has ever done, and he has  _always_  been a man of the people, even if they never quite knew it. He breathes, he sees, he cries – ( _his index finger jerks, and he sleeps_ ).

 

* * *

 

When the blond wakes, heavy lidded eyes protesting his movement and brain exploding with the force of a fission bomb, his immediate thought is that he should not have woken at all. Lungs flutter with air, his heart beating to the rhythm of a child first sitting down behind the drum set, but his eyes won't see and his mind won't think beyond his first thought, repeated in a mantra that echoes off the boundaries of a room he can't make out through blackened eyes. Fingers rake against the floor, grab for walls he cannot seem to reach from his spot splayed across the floor, dust against his wound – or, at least, where it should be. Pale light floods in from beneath the floor, and he realizes simultaneously that he wasn't blind so much as in a dark, dark room, and that the self-inflicted blow to the head has either been rendered useless, or never happened at all.

A dream? It couldn't be. The harsh lighting of the living room, the smell of rain from outside, the biting cold wind from the opened window lashing out against tear-caked cheeks – all too real to be conjured by an overactive mind from a rare bout of deep sleep. But at the same time, there is no bullet hole, which means it couldn't have been  _real_ , either. He fumbles as he tries to discern what is fact from what is fiction, more and more light crawling from the cracks beneath his tennis shoes at the racing of his thoughts, and he can't say how long footsteps have been ringing throughout the air around him before they fully process in his mind, lifting eyes from calloused hands and into the half light of his surroundings.

He sees her form before he sees her face, pale light cascading around her like a veil, and his mind stills like the rest of his body to make room for a name.

"... Mary?" Nikki dares to ask, syllables dancing across the paralyzed air in a waltz that never ends. Time had already been "kind" enough to show him her image ( _twisted, cold_ ) in the eternities following her death, and for a fleeting second, suspicion blossoms in the back of his head. Futile attempts to steel himself at what may very well be another verbal barrage that had driven him to the furthest point, the likes of which he's beginning to doubt ever truly happened at all. Her mouth draws itself into a smile, however, lips upturned in a manner that holds more shameful hesitance than enmity, and the worries wane on cue. Black habit traded for a snow gown – black words traded for pure affection. ( _Not a dream after all._ )

"Nikki," the deceased says. Remorse flickers in the leafy hues of her eyes as his name falls from the tip of her tongue, something pleading in the way she speaks as though she had played some heinous part in setting about everything that had ruined his life in the last eighteen years. No; that's wrong. That's wrong, and even if it hadn't been, he forgives her,  _he forgives her_  -

He howls her name like a war cry in the same moment he leaps to his feet, moving in desperate motions to the only one who'd really cared for him ( _the only one he'd really cared for in turn_ ) and embracing her with a force that would have sent her toppling to the ground had he not caught her in his arms. Words can't hope to describe what he's feeling, and he abandons them without ever giving them a try, trading them in, instead, for feather-light kisses peppered across her face and staccato, whispered promises that had been stolen from him in the night he had confessed to her these same feelings - in the night she had died. Elation promised at the demise of the Doctor cannot compare to what he feels when she reciprocates the hug, dainty arms wrapped around his tattered trench coat and fingers digging into the folds. Perhaps they could have wished for better circumstances than a mutual loss of life – but she is here, and he is here, and he thinks that it is more than enough for him.

It starts with her death and ends with his own, the world around them erupting into brilliant light so strong that he thinks he might go blind and the body in his arms growing weightless in his grip. His own legs seem to disappear as much in sight as in weight, invisible now in the supernova engulfing them, and he pulls away just long enough to catch her eye one last time. A smile –  _two_ , devoured in a sea of white.

Nikki burns the image of Mary's face in his mind and finally learns to let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that concludes our story! If there's any amount of confusion or loose ends left, there are only as many (potentially fewer) as there were in the actual trash ending of Mindcrime II.
> 
> No joke, I could go on for decades about how awful "All the Promises" is, both in the full context of BOTH Mindcrime albums, and especially how it compares to "Eyes of a Stranger", which is easily my favorite song on what is also easily my favorite album. Nikki doesn't GET a happy ending in the original Mindcrime - and, as tragic as his character may be, he... really isn't all that deserving of one. It was a wonderful change of pace to see an ending that WASN'T happy to this story. Mindcrime II's, though? The ending feels slapped on, like a consolation prize for kicking Nikki in the gut for twenty years and tacking on some cliche closure that, ugh, wraps up on an absolutely horrible note. Like, literally. The note. It's ugly sounding. What were they even thinking. At least in Savatage's rock operas, even if the characters find peace of mind or whatever at the end, the endings still feel real. All of their problems aren't magically solved. BUT I DIGRESS. Regrettably, "All the Promises" is the only point in the story where Nikki really feels any sort of "acceptance". Let's be real; had he lived, he'd be back to pointing his thumb at the most convenient excuse (probably the government) until the day he died. Rest in pieces, you lovable idiot.
> 
> Anywho, Mindcrime's, like, my number one fandom - mark that to memory, folks, you'll never hear those words paired up like that in a sentence ever again - and I'll inevitably flood this account with one-shots cross-posted from my very dead Fanfiction.net account, plus new ones that I've had plotted up in my head for a while. If you like what you've read here, or are even just vaguely curious about the characters and content, I'd highly recommend listening to the source material, Queensryche's PHENOMENAL progressive metal rock opera. Even if you're not huge in on the music, the story it tells and the way it tells it is top tier. Just... do yourself a favor and ignore the sequel entirely. I made the mistake of not only giving it a listen, but memorizing all of the words and harmonies. It truly is a curse. *weeps into open hands*
> 
> With all that said, though: Happy reading, and I hope you enjoyed!


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